Character Assassination

A Lexicon of Francophobia, From Emerson to Fox TV

By GEOFFREY NUNBERG

Published: February 9, 2003

think the French are perfidious in all of this. . . . The old Europe gang will not come around," the columnist Morton Kondracke said last week on the Fox network's "Special Report" when the talk turned to Iraq. To which his fellow panelist Fred Barnes replied, "Not only perfidious, but untrustworthy, too."

Mr. Barnes was no doubt just tweaking Mr. Kondracke for using a two-dollar word when a two-bit item like "untrustworthy" would have covered most of the same ground. "Perfidy" literally refers to "the profession of faith or friendship in order to deceive or betray," as the Oxford English Dictionary defines it.

But words are like people: when they enter their dotage, their senses tend to get blurry. Today, a lot of people use "perfidy" and "perfidious" only as vague condemnations that straddle the territory between "pernicious" and "invidious."

A columnist for National Review has applied the words at various times to the French Revolution, Title IX, secular humanism and the metric system &#0151; not exactly things that a Victorian heroine would be tempted to address with an epithet like "false betrayer!"

But then, "perfidy" and "perfidious" aren't words that you encounter in divorce court. If they're still breathing, it's mostly because of their persistence in the language of international politics. It's hard to think of terms that are more suggestive of the old Europe, where antagonisms have long been justified by deficiencies in the national character of your adversaries.

The French and English have been hurling "perfidious" over the Channel since the Hundred Years' War began in 1337. A French poem written shortly after the execution of Mary Queen of Scots in 1587 described the English as a "perfide et brutal" race &#0151; as a French proverb of the period had it, "the loyalty of an Englishman isn't worth a cork."

The British were happy to return the favor. The earliest citation I've found for "perfidious" in English is a reference to "the perfidious frenche" in "Sir Thomas More," an anonymous play written about 1590 that Shakespeare may have had a hand in. By the 18th century, British patriotic poetry was brimming with references to "the Bondage of perfidious France" and "th'ambitious perfidy of France."

Charges of perfidy became more formulaic after the French and the English settled into a less belligerent relationship later in the 19th century, partly because "perfidious" itself was becoming an old-fashioned and slightly comic word. But even now, the French are more likely to be accused of perfidy than any other people.

True, the actual words "perfidy" and "perfidious" aren't used that much anymore. But American and British critics of the Europeans' positions on Iraq are far more likely to invoke stereotypes of the French than of the Germans.

For example, in discussion groups on the Google search engine that mention Iraq, the French are three times as likely to be described as "the frogs" as the Germans are to be described as "the krauts."

One reason for this, of course, is that "krauts" evokes a historical stereotype of megalomaniacal bullies. That's hard to square with current German reservations about going to war over Iraq, though some writers have tried to link the two.

By contrast, critics of the French position have trotted out every calumny in the antique armoire of Francophobia. The French are cowards who fled before Hitler in 1940 ("surrender monkeys," in the phrase popularized by "The Simpsons"); they're ingrates who don't appreciate our bailing them out in 1917 and 1944. They bear the responsibility for Vietnam, street mimes, poodles and pretentious left-wing intellectuals. They're treacherous and hypocritical, anti-Semitic and avaricious, voluptuary and unhygienic, incompetent and rude. And they have rotten taste in comedians: a Google search turns up more than 600 hits for pages including "France," "Iraq" and "Jerry Lewis."

America wasn't born to its Francophobia. At the time of the Revolution, Americans were generally well disposed to the nation of Lafayette and the Enlightenment. Yale students of the early 1790's were fond of affecting sobriquets like "Moli&#0232;re," "Rousseau" and "d'Alembert."

It wasn't until after the French Revolution that American conservatives began to turn on the French. In 1815, Cyrus King, a Massachusetts Federalist, opposed the government's acquisition of Thomas Jefferson's library because it included the irreligious, immoral and seditious works of French philosophers, which were written in a language that "many cannot read and most ought not."

Emerson, alarmed by the excesses of the French Revolution, wrote, "In France `fraternity,' `equality' and `indivisible unity' are names for assassination." And at the end of the century, the ferocious anti-Semitism of the Dreyfus affair led Mark Twain to call the French "the connecting link between man and the monkey."

But Francophobia has never been an essential trait of American national identity the way it has for the British, who would hardly know who they were if France should suddenly sink into the Atlantic.

Modern France-bashing, like the bow ties favored by some young conservatives, is a nod to the conservative blue-bloods of earlier generations, as well as a reaction to the culture wars and the pernicious (if not perfidious) influence that modern French thought has had on American academics.

But France-bashing is also a tribute to the continuing cachet of French culture. After all, the charge of perfidy always implies seductiveness and betrayed affection, just as those detailed enumerations of French failings imply a cosmopolitan familiarity with the place. As an English saying has it, "love France &#0151; pity about the French."

In the end, it's hard to think of anything that is more old Europe than those appeals to national stereotypes. It leaves you with the picture of a continent whose politics are still animated by the traits of national character, like a Commedia dell'Arte troupe. That's plainly irrelevant to the present situation, since polls show that Europeans are pretty much of a single, skeptical mind on the Bush administration's line on Iraq, whatever position their leaders have taken.

Granted, the Europeans are just as quick to resort to stereotyping of the United States. A search of articles in the French, Italian and German press over the past two years turns up almost 200 that mention "Bush" in the vicinity of "cowboy." They'd do well to realize that this doesn't have much to do with the old America, either.

Geoffrey Nunberg, a Stanford linguist, is heard regularly on NPR's "Fresh Air" and wrote "The Way We Talk Now."